Perhaps it's just that this is the first Sunday in quite a while that I've had opportunity to lounge about in the morning and read the Sunday papers long enough to make it to the news sections of the papers -- I always try to ease my way into the day by starting with the sports and comics before I get to the silly sections -- but lately the news seems to be weirder than the comics.
Let's take it from the top. In the midst of this summer's silliness around the health-care debate comes this sobering news: Blue Cross hits customers with 22% rate hike.
The good news? Blue Cross tried to make it a 56% rate hike, but couldn't get that past the Michigan attorney general's office. In defense of Blue Cross, their basic problem is that right now the private insurers are shedding sick folks as fast as posssible and shoving them over to Blue Cross, which is required by state law to cover everybody.
And yet a vocal minority still thinks we don't need fundamental health care reform in this country.
Speaking of the health-care tempest. I do owe the right-wing crazies one apology. It seems that we are on the verge of death panels: Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance. From the story:
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Forget government bureaucrats with death panels. Wall Street investors will now have a vested interest in seeing you dead.
Yes, this was the winner in this morning's "make John feel as if he's arrived in a strange science-fictional future" contest. Given the chronic shortfall in state government budgets, can it be long before we see a state lottery offering based on a similar death-pool premise? A reality TV show can only ensue.
I'm tempted to pass over the most ridiculous partisan tempest in this weekend's teapot of recent news weirdness: the bizarre right-wing movement to boycott an Obama speech to schoolchildren that will undoubtedly urge controversial positions like studying hard and brushing teeth.
But instead I will ask this. Isn't this the same group of pundits and reactionaries who spent the last eight years telling me that disagreeing with George W. Bush on any point of policy made me a deeply unpatriotic traitor to America because he was the President and we all had to support the President in a time of war?
Bartender, a round of mirrors for the house. Hypocrisy, thy name is the increasingly deranged right-wing punditocracy. Seriously, there used to be serious, thoughtful people in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Where did they go? And who left the nutcases in charge?
Finally, our survey of the Sunday paper returns to the topic of my sports-and-comics morning habit. After first deciding that they didn't want to bother with delivering my morning paper more than three times a week, the Detroit Free Press has now decided to cut another six comics (including my good buddy, Spider-Man!) from the tattered online remnants of my morning comic page yet again. You told us what features you wanted, and we listened.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't tell them to lop another half-dozen comics out of their already shrunken lineup. Stranger yet, they are now officially recommending that I go to other online sources to feed my morning habit. From the article: "If we discontinued your favorite comic, there are many free Web sites that run comic strips. "
So, my morning paper is no longer delivered in the mornings and is no longer paper. And now it recommends that I just go straight to better online sources for what they used to provide. Then they wonder why their circulation is plummeting.
Um, okay. GoComics.com, you've got yourself another "My Comics Page" registrant.
Speaking of GoComics.com, I started there a few months agp after Gil Thorpe got cut from the lineup. There are a few comics aggregators out there. They just happened to be the one that carried Gil Thorpe. But my list over on GoComics is now starting to look like a better bet than the Free Press's comics page. Here's what I'm reading over there:
Bloom County
Calvin and Hobbes
Pickles
The Quigmans
Gil Thorp
The Fusco Brothers
Tank McNamara
Candorville
Garfield Minus Garfield
Liberty Meadows
C'est la Vie
The Norm
Too Much Coffee Man
The Argyle Sweater
Beward, Free Press. That list is starting to crowd you out for reading goodness.
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Speaking of mirrors, my reaction to the Freep and NYT this morning perfectly mirrored yours! The comments I scribbled for Brigitte to wake up to, when I bring her coffee and papers, isn't fit to print, but it did urge someone called O to do to those WS jokers what is euphemistically referred to as neutering.
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